Audio 3:43
Scientists discover dinosaur, name it 'chicken from hell'

Will OckendenUpdated
Thu 20 Mar 2014, 9:53 PM AEDT

It was more than three meters long, weighed a quarter of a tonne, and looked a bit like a huge stretched out chicken. It was a feathered dinosaur, and scientists in the United States have found its remains in North and South Dakota.

Transcript

MARK COLVIN: It was more than three meters long, weighed a quarter of a tonne, and looked a bit like a huge, stretched-out chicken. It was a feathered dinosaur, and scientists in the United States have found its remains in North and South Dakota. The discovery came after years of searching.

Unofficially, it's called the 'the chicken from hell', but the researchers say it helps fill in gaps in the evolutionary timeline.

Will Ockenden reports.

WILL OCKENDEN: If it looks a bit like a chicken, and tastes a bit like a chicken, it might actually be a three-and-a-half meter long, absurd-looking murderous dinosaur.

EMMA SCHACHNER: It has a really large crest on its head, kind of like a cassowary. And it has a large beak, and a long neck, and it's about five feet tall at the hips, and approximately 11 feet long; around 500 pounds.

So it's like if you took a chicken and merged it with a cassowary and an ostrich, and then stretched it out and made it really big with a whacky head.

WILL OCKENDEN: Palaeontologist Emma Schachner is from the University of Utah. She was one of the authors of the paper which published the discovery.

EMMA SCHACHNER: So what we have is a largely complete oviraptorosaurian dinosaur. It's within theropoda, which encompasses a group of predatory dinosaurs, and it's the second-largest of this type of dinosaur ever found. It's the largest one found in North America, and we have three different individuals of this dinosaur, so we were able to determine that it's a new species and give it the name Anzu wyliei.

WILL OCKENDEN: The 'wyliei' part of its name is after the grandson of a donor to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which was instrumental in the discovery. The Anzu part is far more terrifying.

EMMA SCHACHNER: 'Anzu' is a Mesopotamian bird demon, and because this looks like a really funny, stretched-out chicken, but it's on the Hell Creek formation, we thought that 'hell chicken' or 'chicken from hell' was a really great way of describing it, so we gave it this mythological name.

WILL OCKENDEN: Whenever a new dinosaur is discovered, it allows scientists to add another piece to the evolutionary puzzle. The title 'chicken from hell' has stuck, but despite the name it's not really an ancestor of today's birds.

It's on the same evolutionary timeline, but Anzu's descendants likely eventually died out. But it does show scientists that while Anzu has some very birdy features, like its crest and its lack of teeth, they likely evolved independently from the dinosaurs which eventually became birds.

Andrew Rozefelds is head of geosciences at the Queensland Museum.

ANDREW ROZEFELDS: So every time you find something new, it actually helps you not only just simply record something that is new to science, by having these really well-preserved iconic specimens, you can speculate about how evolution occurred.

WILL OCKENDEN: This is dubbed the 'chicken from hell', it's found in North America. You're in Queensland. When are you going to discover Australia's chook from hell?

ANDREW ROZEFELDS: (laughs) Well, we've got a very spectacular theropod dinosaur from Winton which was called Australovenator.

WILL OCKENDEN: Very fierce, I'm led to believe.

ANDREW ROZEFELDS: Very fierce, and you certainly wouldn't want to meet it in a dark alley.

WILL OCKENDEN: Living in the Cretaceous means Anzu lived about 65 million years ago. That's the same time as the so-called king of the dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex. So as for what Anzu would have tasted like, only T-rex knows for sure. But Emma Schachner is happy to have a guess.

EMMA SCHACHNER: It would've tasted like chicken, I'm sure, because alligator tastes like fishy chicken, most modern birds taste like chicken. So you can then, you know, reconstruct that chicken taste as ancestral for archosaurs, the group that encompasses all crocodilians and birds. Chicken is my closest guess.

MARK COLVIN: As Homer Simpson would've said: 'Mmmm, chicken'.

Emma Schachner from the University of Utah ending Will Ockenden's report. The study is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.